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My Life With Mario Vargas Llosa by Julia Urquidi Illanes. New York. 1988. Peter Lang. 0820406899. Translated from the Spanish by C. R. Perricone. Series XXII Latin American Studies Vol.1. 264 pages. hardcover.

0820406899 DESCRIPTION - Living in a Paris garret with a struggling young writer who has since become a famous author was not fictional for Julia Urquidi Illanes when she married Mario Vargas Llosa. This English translation is an incredible but true 'portrait of an artist as a young man' and of his aunt by marriage, whom he later fictionalized in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Married for 9 years, Julia typed the first of his best-selling novels, The Time of the Hero, only to be abandoned when Mario fell in love with his first cousin Patricia, who is now his second wife. Readers will find this behind the scene account of a writer nominated for the Nobel prize gives insights into the creative processes of a novelist as it relates the range of human emotions in real life.

Urquidi Illanes Julia AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Urquidi Illanes (30 May 1926 - 10 March 2010) was a Bolivian writer. Urquidi was born in Cochabamba. She was famous as the first wife of Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa (1955-1964) and also the namesake of one of his most famous novels, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. In 1983 she published her memories titled Lo que Varguitas no dijo (English: What Varguitas did not say). She died in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, aged 83.The English translator Catherine R. Perricone is Professor of Foreign Languages at Auburn University specializing in current Spanish American literature. She edited Alma y Corazon (Heart and Soul) an anthology of Latin American poetesses, and has published articles on Vargas Llosa and other novelists, an extensive bibliography on feminist criticism and Spanish American poetesses, and other subjects in Hispanic literature which have appeared in such journals as Hispania, Foreign Language Annals, Circulo, USF Language Quarterly, and The Americas Review.

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The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert & Madame Bovary by Mario Vargas Llosa. New York. 1986. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374230773. Translated from the Spanish by Helen R. Lane. 240 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Cynthia Krupat. Author photo by Alicia Benwides (1982).

DESCRIPTION - A handful of fictional characters have marked my life more profoundly than a great number of flesh-and-blood beings I have known,' Vargas Llosa writes, but with none of them ‘have I had as clearly passionate a relationship as Emma Bovary.' His devotion to her, the novel, and its creator, ever since he first read Madame Bovary during his student days in Paris, when he had ‘very little money and the promise of a scholarship,' has been so complete that he has written an entire book about them. The Perpetual Orgy is his first nonfiction book to appear in English. The book's first section, ‘An Unrequited Passion,' is a tête-a-tête with Emma Bovary The second, ‘The Pen-Man,' traces the gestation and birth of the novel, as well as Flaubert's method, his mania for documentation, and the novel's literary sources. The third, ‘The First Modern Novel,' situates Madame Bovary in literary history. Only the greatest of novels deserves, or can support, this kind of analysis. It is a tribute to THE PERPETUAL ORGY (Flaubert's phrase for losing oneself in literature) that it sends the reader back to Flaubert's masterpiece with renewed interest.

Vargas Llosa Mario AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (28 March 1936 – 13 April 2025), more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, and politician. Vargas Llosa was one of the most significant Latin American novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a more substantial international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". Vargas Llosa rose to international fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, 1963/1966), The Green House (La casa verde, 1965/1968), and the monumental Conversation in The Cathedral (Conversación en La Catedral, 1969/1975). He wrote prolifically across various literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. He won the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize and the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award. Several of his works have been adopted as feature films, such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973/1978) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977/1982). Vargas Llosa's perception of Peruvian society and his experiences as a native Peruvian influenced many of his works. Increasingly, he expanded his range and tackled themes from other parts of the world. In his essays, Vargas Llosa criticized nationalism in different parts of the world. Like many Latin American writers, Vargas Llosa was politically active. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted with its policies, particularly after the imprisonment of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, and later identified as a liberal and held anti–left-wing ideas. He ran for the presidency of Peru with the centre-right Democratic Front coalition in the 1990 election, advocating for liberal reforms, but lost the election to Alberto Fujimori in a landslide. Vargas Llosa continued his literary career while advocating for right-wing activists and candidates internationally following his exit from direct participation in Peruvian politics. He was awarded the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1995 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 2012 Carlos Fuentes Prize, and the 2018 Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit. In 2011, Vargas Llosa was made Marquess of Vargas Llosa by the Spanish king Juan Carlos I. In 2021, he was elected to the Académie Française.

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Rebellion in the Backlands by Euclides da Cunha. Chicago. 1944. University of Chicago Press. Translated from the Portuguese & With An Introduction and Notes by Samuel Putnam. 526 pages. hardcover.

rebellion in the backlands u of chicago press 1944 DESCRIPTION - One of the strangest stories ever found in a little-known corner of history, this is a human and military account of a war waged between a ragged religious mystic and the government of Brazil. It was a peculiarly personal war that had much in common with old-time Kentucky feuds and uprisings on the American frontier and it ended only when 5,200 houses and every man, woman, and child who had lived in them had been totally destroyed! This is the story of Antonio Conselheiro, the fanatic street preacher-Messiah to thousands-who led the rebellion in a primitive backwoods community of desert and mountains from December, 1896, to October, 1897. Mr. Putnam, in his excellent Introduction, reminds us that it required three months for a federal army of some 6,000 men to advance 100 yards against a handful of backwoodsmen. ‘Here is guerrilla warfare in its pristine form,' he says, ‘with the ‘scorched earth' and all the other accompaniments . . . a months-long house-to-house battle that recalls the contemporary epic of Stalingrad.' Universally known as Brazil's greatest book, Os Sertoes is now in its sixteenth Brazilian edition and has been translated into several foreign languages. ‘Os Sertoes is a Genesis which in epic accents tells of the meeting of civilization and barbarism,' says Afrânio Peixoto . . . . It is a book that represents a moment in the history of humanity; and, thanks to its style, its art, and its science, that ephemeral moment is destined to be eternal.' Carleton Beals calls it ‘that great document, which, though not a novel, reads like fiction.' Stefan Zweig, in BRAZIL, LAND OF THE FUTURE, calls it a ‘great national epic . destined to outlive countless books that are famous today, by its dramatic significance, its spectacular wealth of spiritual wisdom, and the wonderful humanitarian touch Cunha himself called his book ‘a cry of protest' against what he regarded as - a crime and an act of madness on the part of the newly formed republican government of Brazil. Os Sertöes is a document against oppression of the weak by the strong-in current language, against totalitarianism. Cunha has been called a ‘son of the soil, madly in love with it,' but be was also a scientist, a military engineer by profession, a sociologist, a reporter, and a man of letters. In the first two chapters of his book he describes with precision and passion the geographic and geologic composition of the backlands, its botany, climate, and soil, all, however, as interpretation of the mestizo backwoodsman and his way of life. Cunha's hook was originally published in Rio in 1902. It bad an immediate and terrific impact upon Brazil-indeed, so much so that Cunha's assassination in 1909 by a soldier was said to be in retaliation for the exposures of the army in Os Sertöes and in fear of another book which Cunha was writing at the time of his death. This, the first translation of Os Sertöes into English, because of its importance to better understanding between South and North America, has had aid in publication from the Office of the Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs. REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS is Mr. Putnam's twenty-fifth full-length published book translation. He has made available to American readers many of the great books from the French, Italian, and Portuguese.

And in a more recent transltion from Penguin Classics:

Backlands: The Canudos Campaign by Euclides da Cunha. New York. 2010. Penguin Books. 9780143106074. Translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Lowe. Introduction by Ilan Stavans. 513 pages. paperback. Cover art: Elsa Chiao.

DESCRIPTION - Written by a former army lieutenant, civil engineer, and journalist, Backlands: The Canudos Campaign, is Euclides da Cunha's vivid and poignant portrayal of Brazil's infamous War of Canudos. deadliest civil war in Brazilian history, the conflict during the 1890s was between the government and the village of Canudos, in the northeastern state of Bahia, settled by 30,000 followers of the religious zealot Antonio Conselheiro. Far from just an objective retelling, da Cunha's story shows both the significance of this event and the complexities of Brazilian society. Featuring a new translation by Elizabeth Lowe, and an introduction by Ilan Stavans, one of Latin America's foremost scholars, this is sure to remain one of the best chronicles of war ever penned.

da Cunha Euclides AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Euclides da Cunha (January 20, 1866 - August 15, 1909) was a Brazilian journalist, sociologist and engineer. His most important work is Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), a non-fictional account of the military expeditions promoted by the Brazilian government against the rebellious village of Canudos, known as the War of Canudos. This book was a favorite of Robert Lowell, who put it above Tolstoy, the Russian writer. Jorge Luis Borges also commented on it in his short story ‘Three Versions of Judas‘. The book was translated into English by Samuel Putnam and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1944. It remains in print. Euclides da Cunha was also heavily influenced by Naturalism and its Darwinian proponents. Os Sertões characterised the coast of Brazil as a chain of civilisations while the interior was more primitively influenced. Euclides da Cunha was the basis for the character of The Journalist in Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World. Euclides da Cunha occupied the 7th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1903 until his death in 1909.

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Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 by Emilia Viotti Da Costa. New York. 1994. Oxford University Press. 0195082982. 378 pages. hardcover. Cover: David Tran.

0195082982 DESCRIPTION - On the night of August 17, 1823, the distinctly African sounds of blaring shell-horns and beating drums signalled the start of one of the most massive slave rebellions in the history of the Western Hemisphere, the uprising in the British colony of Demerara (now Guyana). That evening, nine to twelve thousand slaves surrounded the main houses of about sixty plantations, armed with cutlasses, knives fastened on poles, and guns. They broke down doors, smashed windows, commandeered arms and ammunition, and put their masters and overseers in the stocks. Intent on avoiding a blood bath (over three days of fighting, colonial forces took the lives of more than 255 slaves, while only two or three white men were killed), the rebels spoke of 'rights,' and planned to present their grievances to the governor. For a few days, the slaves succeeded in turning the world upside down, treating masters the way masters had always treated slaves. Retaliation from colonial officials would be swift, bloody, and brutal. In Crowns of Glory, Emilia Viotti da Costa tells the riveting story of a pivotal moment in the history of slavery. Studying the complaints brought by slaves to the office of the Protector of Slaves, she reconstructs the experience of slavery through the eyes of the Demerara slaves themselves. Da Costa also draws on eyewitness accounts, official records, and private journals (most notably the diary of John Smith, one of four ministers sent by the London Missionary Society to convert Demerara's 'heathen'), to paint a vivid portrait of a society in transition, shaken to its foundations by the recent revolutions in America, France, and Haiti.

Da Costa Emilia Viotti AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Emilia Viotti da Costa (São Paulo, February 28, 1928 - São Paulo, November 2, 2017) was a Brazilian historian and professor.

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The Discovery and Conquest of Peru by Agustin de Zarate. New York. 1968. Penguin Books. Translated from the Spanish & With An Introduction by J. M. Cohen. 282 pages. paperback. L202. The cover shows a detail from a sixteenth-century map in the Bibliotheque du Ministers des Armees, Paris (Snark International).

pc discovery and conquest of peru DESCRIPTION - There is no full eye-witness account of the Spaniards' dramatic defeat of the Incas. For this new compilation, therefore, J. M. Cohen has translated the best contemporary history - that of Agustin de Zarate - and embellished it with firsthand descriptions of the country and the extraordinary exploits of the conquistadors. These graphic additions turn Zarate's history, with its careful record of the discovery and conquest of Peru and of the subsequent civil wars, into a rounded and continuous narrative which does justice to the landings, the heroic marches across the mountains, Atahuallpa's death, and the incredible harvest of treasure.

Zarate Agustin de AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Agustín de Zárate (1514-1585) was an administrator, chronicler, and Spanish historian. For fifteen years he was an accountant for the Council of Castile and in 1543 was appointed accountant for the Viceroyalty of Peru and Tierra Firme. He arrived in Peru in 1544. In 1545 he returned to Spain where he faced an accusation of treason, because of the history that he wrote of the discovery and conquest of Peru. In 1555 Agustín de Zárate was assigned to a job within the fiscal administration and settled in Guadalcanal (Seville), where he monitored Spain's important silver mines that had just been discovered in that locality.

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Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. New York. 1927. Tudor Publishing Company. Edited by Floyd Dell & Paul Jordan-Smith. 1036 pages. hardcover.

anatomy of melancholy tudor publishinng 1927 DESCRIPTION - An amazing and entertaining book on the causes, symptoms, varieties and cure of morbid depression. On its surface, The Anatomy Of Melancholy is presented as a medical textbook in which Burton applies his vast and varied learning, in the scholastic manner, to the subject of melancholia (which includes, although it is not limited to, what is now termed clinical depression). Though presented as a medical text, The Anatomy of Melancholy is as much a sui generis work of literature as it is a scientific or philosophical text, and Burton addresses far more than his stated subject. In fact, the Anatomy uses melancholy as the lens through which all human emotion and thought may be scrutinized, and virtually the entire contents of a 17th-century library are marshalled into service of this goal. It is encyclopedic in its range and reference.

Burton Robert

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Burton (8 February 1577 - 25 January 1640) was an English scholar at Oxford University, best known for the classic The Anatomy of Melancholy. He was also the incumbent of St Thomas the Martyr, Oxford, and of Seagrave in Leicestershire.

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The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. Afterword By J. Sherwood Weber. 384 pages. paperback. CD27. Signet Classic original.

sc way of all flesh cd27 DESCRIPTION - This devastating indictment of Victorian values presents an ironic and incisive portrait, of a determined, young man in revolt against father, religion, society, self. In describing Ernest Pontifex's flight to freedom, Samuel Butler illustrated the emotional and intellectual experiences of every artist who educates himself through trial and error. He created a novel that was to inspire, in spirit and form, the works of such writers as Somerset Maugham, James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe. George Bernard Shaw was deeply influenced by Butler's ideas on religion and money. In his preface to Major Barbara, Shaw recorded this debt and called Butler 'a man of genius' who was 'in his own department, the greatest English writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century.'

Butler Samuel AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Butler (4 or 5 December 1835 - 18 June 1902) was an iconoclastic Victorian-era English author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler also made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey which remain in use to this day.

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re: f (gesture): poems by Percival Everett. Los Angeles. 2006. Black Goat. 1597090573. Series editor: Chris Abani. 70 pages. paperback. Cover art: Percival Everett.

1597090573 DESCRIPTION - Praise for Percival Everett: “. . . Artful and literate, Everett explores the philosophical, the metaphysical, the physical and the psychological boundaries of human life . . .” ―Terry D’Auray. “. . . Everett achieves a primal sense of dislocation, forcing us to question how we determine the limits of the human . . . ” ―Sven Birkets, The New York Times. “. . . The audacious, uncategorizable Everett. He mixes genre and tone with absolute abandon, never does the same song twice. Brilliant . . .” ―The Boston Globe. “. . . An author who dances with language as effortlessly as Fred Astaire.” ―Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael.

Everett Percival AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Half an Inch of Water: Stories by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2015. Graywolf Press. 9781555977191. 166 pages. paperback. Cover design: Kapo Ng.

9781555977191 DESCRIPTION - A new collection of stories set in the West from "one of the most gifted and versatile of contemporary writers" (NPR). Percival Everett's long-awaited new collection of stories, his first since 2004's Damned If I Do, finds him traversing the West with characteristic restlessness. A deaf Native American girl wanders off into the desert and is found untouched in a den of rattlesnakes. A young boy copes with the death of his sister by angling for an unnaturally large trout in the creek where she drowned. An old woman rides her horse into a mountain snowstorm and sees a long-dead beloved dog. For the plainspoken men and women of these stories―fathers and daughters, sheriffs and veterinarians―small events trigger sudden shifts in which the ordinary becomes unfamiliar. A harmless comment about how to ride a horse changes the course of a relationship, a snakebite gives rise to hallucinations, and the hunt for a missing man reveals his uncanny resemblance to an actor. Half an Inch of Water tears through the fabric of the everyday to examine what lies beneath the surface of these lives. In the hands of master storyteller Everett, the act of questioning leads to vistas more strange and unsettling than could ever have been expected.

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Damned if I Do: Stories by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2004. Graywolf Press. 1555974112. 206 pages. paperback. Cover design: VetoDesignUSA.com.

1555974112 DESCRIPTION - Damned If I Do is an exceptional collection of short stories by Percival Everett, author of the highly praised and wickedly funny novel Erasure. People are just naturally hopeful, a term my grandfather used to tell me was more than occasionally interchangeable with stupid. A cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen, and a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed car chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in sight: a manual mustard dispenser, a mouthful of crooked teeth, thirty-two parking tickets, and a sexual-identity problem. Percival Everett is a master storyteller who ingeniously addresses issues of race and prejudice by simultaneously satirizing and celebrating the human condition.

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Walk Me to the Distance by Percival L. Everett. New York. 1985. Ticknor & Fields. 0899193218. 209 pages. hardcover. Jacket photo: Martha Jordan.

0899193218 DESCRIPTION - David Larson can't go home again; that's given. So David, recently returned from Vietnam, heads for the West of his imagination. He fetches up in Slut's Hole, Wyoming, where he settles in with a one-legged, widow-lady sheep rancher named Sixbury and her severely retarded son. When Butch, a seven-year-old Vietnamese war orphan, and Sixbury's son abruptly disappear, David is forced to a desperate - and correct - conclusion. In classic style, a posse is organized and goes about its mortal business. Like it or not, David makes his commitment. With spare strokes, Percival Everett paints the Western landscape as it is today, clinging to a mythical heritage and a frontier code that may be seriously skewed in a world that has passed it by. In big-sky country the mere act of living is hard and cruel and heart-stopping. Of Everett's first novel, SUDER, the Los Angeles Times said, ‘Percival Everett has created here a mad work of comic genius. . . to make up a narrative that has never, never been told before.' His new novel brings to mind the stark beauty of HUD and SHANE and THE OX-BOW INCIDENT.

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Zulus by Percival Everett. Sag Harbor. 1990. Permanent Press. 0932966977. 245 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Bruce McGowin. Cover illustration by Robert Wade.

0932966977 DESCRIPTION - ZULUS is a difficult book to describe, for it is unlike any other novel one is likely to encounter, both for substance and style. It blends realism and surrealism; its very starkness creates the richest of images, and it features a most unlikely heroine who undergoes a bizarre transformation. It has comic moments in unlikely situations, and ambitiously attempts to grapple with the most serious issues before us today, though it takes place in the far future. ZULUS is set amidst the eerie landscape and society that has emerged years after the occurrence of a thermonuclear war, where Alice Achitophel, a 300-pound government clerk and misfit, has a well-kept secret: she is, perhaps, the last woman alive who is not sterile. As such, she poses a threat to the government and is coveted by rebels. Her plight, her experiences as an outcast, and her unusual love affair are not only engrossing in their own right, but serve to convey themes that Percival Everett has dwelt on in his other work: isolation, alienation, and a search for familial integrity. Ultimately, however, Alice's adventures raise the most fundamental issue of all: is the continuation of mankind - with all of his culture and all of his craziness - compatible with the survival of the planet Earth and the other life forms that inhabit it?

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Suder by Percival L. Everett. New York. 1983. Viking Press. 0670681105. 171 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by David Fe Bland. Jacket design by George W. Sanders, Jr.

0670681105 DESCRIPTION - With his beloved Charlie Parker record (‘Ornithology') tucked under one arm and a portable phonograph under the other; Craig Suder, black third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, is headed out of town. He has lost touch with his wife, with his friends, with the ball. He is haunted by memories of a ghastly summer years ago when his mother was obsessed with running a full circle around Fayetteville in her winter coat, and he prays that insanity is not passed down through the blood. But Suder has begun to see things a little too clearly, to hear things a little too well. He is, in short, going crazy. On his way to the woods Suder adopts a companion, an elephant whom he wins fair and square and lovingly names Renoir, and is adopted in turn by a nine-year-old runaway named Jincy, sassy, exasperating, and lovable. Together the three friends hole up in a cabin and outfox au intruders - the local sheriff, a drug smuggler, an amateur taxidermist with a longing for Renoir (‘Call me if he dies?'), an overweight homosexual Chinaman, and an amorous barfly. Suder wants peace and quiet; he needs to concentrate on fulfilling a childhood dream: flight. Not running-away flight, but the soaring, swooping, gliding flight of a bird. What happens 2,000 feet in the air above Ezra Pond should come as a surprise to no one. But it will. Percival Everett's is an original and comic voice; he has taken the energies of jazz and transformed them into prose. He has located the heart of the absurd and found it full of tears. SUDER is a funny unsettling, and triumphant first novel by a gifted young writer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His 13 previous books include FRENZY (1997), WATERSHED (1996), and SUDER (1983).

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The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair by Percival Everett. Little Rock. 1987. August House. 0874830133. 116 pages. paperback. Cover design by Communications Graphics.

0874830133 DESCRIPTION - A ranch hand inadvertently steps into the no-man's-land between an estranged father and son. A painter stakes his work and heart against the chic world of art speculation. A U.S. border patrolman hunts a desperate Mexican boy. A retired dentist turns his hands to the creation of miniature towns and landscapes and finds his fate entangled in theirs. These are some of the characters and situations you'll meet in THE WEATHER AND WOMEN TREAT ME FAIR, the first short story collection by novelist Percival Everett. Despite the wide-ranging action, these stories are unified by spare dialogue, tight plot development and a deadpan irony which is in evidence throughout. They are told in a casual, almost flat, tone - but don't be caught unawares: the understatement belies a vivid symbolic landscape that will suddenly appear before your eyes, like a mesa cropping up on the edge of the desert where Everett seems so at home. In all fifteen stories, heroes who tend to be loners grapple with alienation and falsity. Yet despite a surface pessimism, certain values emerge. Again and again, kinship, community and dignity prove resistant to the eroding and degrading forces of our times.

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Cutting Lisa by Percival Everett. New York. 1986. Ticknor & Fields. 0899194125. 147 pages. hardcover.

0899194125 DESCRIPTION - Early one morning sixty-six-year-old John Livesey, a recently retired Virginia obstetrician, is called in on a bizarre case: a man with no medical training has successfully performed a Caesarean, without anesthesia, on his wife. The act itself appalls Livesey, but the man's uncompromising willfulness somehow moves him and continues to haunt him all the way to the Oregon coast, where he is to spend the summer with his son's family. Elgin worries that his widowed father may be at loose ends, but John is totally captivated by his granddaughter, starts an affair with a much younger woman, and drinks beer and eats bacon - to the horror of his fastidious daughter-in-law, Lisa. Lisa is pregnant, but something is amiss. In a dramatic mishap, John discovers the truth about Lisa's baby. Will he dare to play a wrathful God? In characteristically lean prose Percival Everett pits the harsh tenets of Old Testament retribution against a twentieth-century morality based on freedom of choice.

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For Her Dark Skin by Percival Everett. Seattle. 1990. Owl Creek. 0937669458. 152 pages. hardcover. Cover art by Shere C. Everett.

0937669458 DESCRIPTION - FOR HER DARK SKIN is a tightly crafted exploration of the story of Jason and Medea weaving both traditional and contemporary fictional and thematic elements into a sharply ironic tale of revenge, ambition, passion and pride. Desires and consequences lead the all-too-human characters through a piercing new interpretation of classic themes.

Everett Percival

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Wounded: A Novel by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2005. Graywolf Press. 1555974279. 210 pages. hardcover. Cover design: Scott Sorenson. Cover photograph: Tim Flach.

1555974279 DESCRIPTION - Training horses is dangerous--a head-to-head confrontation with a 1,000 pounds of muscle and little sense takes courage, but more importantly patience and smarts. It is these same qualities that allow John and his uncle Gus to live in the beautiful high desert of Wyoming. A black horse trainer is a curiosity, at the very least, but a familiar curiosity in these parts. It is the brutal murder of a young gay man, however, that pushes this small community to the teetering edge of fear and tolerance. As the first blizzard of the season gains momentum, John is forced to reckon not only with the daily burden of unruly horses, a three-legged coyote pup, an escape-artist mule, and too many people, but also a father-son war over homosexuality, random hate-crimes, and―perhaps most frightening of all--a chance for love. Highly praised for his storytelling and ability to address the toughest issues of our time with humor, grace, and originality, Everett offers yet another brilliant novel.

Everett Percival

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Telephone: A Novel by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2020. Graywolf Press. 9781644450222. 220 pages. paperback. Cover design: Kapo Ng.

9781644450222 DESCRIPTION - FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN FICTION. An astonishing new novel of loss and grief from “one of our culture’s preeminent novelists” (Los Angeles Times). Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area―the geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon―he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches. After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter’s slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he’s ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission. A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is a Percival Everett novel we should have seen coming all along, one that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.

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So Much Blue by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2017. Graywolf Press. 9781555977825. 244 pages. paperback. Cover design: Kapo Ng.

9781555977825 DESCRIPTION - A new high point for a master novelist, an emotionally charged reckoning with art, marriage, and the past. Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won’t allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet (and three inches) that is covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn’t know or, more accurately, doesn’t care. What Kevin does care about are the events of the past. Ten years ago he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. Kevin relates this event with a dispassionate air, even a bit of puzzlement. It’s not clear to him why he had the affair, but he can’t let it go. In the more distant past of the late seventies, Kevin and Richard traveled to El Salvador on the verge of war to retrieve Richard’s drug-dealing brother, who had gone missing without explanation. As the events of the past intersect with the present, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he’s made for his art and the secrets he’s kept from his wife.So Much Blue features Percival Everett at his best, and his deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a brilliantly readable new novel.

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I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2009. Graywolf Press. 9781555975272. 236 pages. paperback. Cover design: Kapo Ng.

9781555975272 DESCRIPTION - I Am Not Sidney Poitier is an irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett, and an irreverent take on race, class, and identity in America. I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation. Percival Everett's hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney's tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, sparks a dinnertable explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem: "What's your name?" a kid would ask. "Not Sidney," I would say. "Okay, then what is it?"

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Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2013. Graywolf Press. 9781555976347. 230 pages. paperback. Cover design: Kapo Ng.

9781555976347 DESCRIPTION - "Anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lie." ―Wall Street Journal. * Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * Finalist for the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction * A story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write? Let's simplify: a woman seeks an apprenticeship with a painter, claiming to be his long-lost daughter. A contractor-for-hire named Murphy can't distinguish between the two brothers who employ him. And in Murphy's troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. These narratives twist together with anecdotes from the nursing home, each building on the other until they crest in a wild, outlandish excursion of the inmates led by the father. Anchoring these shifting plotlines is a running commentary between father and son that sheds doubt on the truthfulness of each story. Because, after all, what narrator can we ever trust? Not only is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell a powerful, compassionate meditation on old age and its humiliations, it is an ingenious culmination of Everett's recurring preoccupations. All of his prior work, his metaphysical and philosophical inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this masterful book. Percival Everett has never been more cunning, more brilliant and subversive, than he is in this, his most important and elusive novel to date.

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A History of the African-American People [proposed] by Strom Thurmond by Percival and Kincaid Everett. New York. 2004. Akashic Books. 1888451572. 312 pages. paperback. Cover design by Celena Pane and Keith Campbell.

1888451572 DESCRIPTION - ‘This is the funniest novel I have read in years!' - Clarence Major. In A HISTORY OF THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN PEOPLE (proposed), Percival Everett and James Kincaid present a fictitious chronicle of former South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond's desire to pen a history of African-Americans - his and his aides' belief being that he has done as much, or more, than any American to shape that history. An epistolary novel, A HISTORY follows the letters of loose-cannon Congressional office workers, insane interns at a large New York publishing house, and disturbed publishing executives, along with homicidal rival editors, and kindly family friends. Strom Thurmond appears charming and open, mad and sure of his place in American history. ‘Percival Everett has been wrestling the angel for years, in all its incarnations - literary novel, Western, naturalist story, experimental work, satire - and in each case he's pinned the angel, made it call uncle. Now he's gone tagteam with James Kincaid, so expect more damage. That Everett is not better known, that he fails to be mentioned alongside the likes of Philip Roth, John Updike, and Tony Morrison, shames us all.' - JAMES SALLIS, author of CHESTER HIMES: A LIFE. ‘This is the funniest novel I've read in years! I had trouble reading it because I had to stop to laugh out loud so often. Among many other things it's a treasure of satiric humor. Don't pass it up!' - Clarence Major, author of CONFIGURATIONS.

Everett Percival and Kincaid James AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett is the author of fifteen works of fiction, among them GLYPH, WATERSHED, GOD'S COUNTRY and FRENZY. His most recent novel ERASURE won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and did little to earn him friends. James Kincaid is Aerol Arnold Professor of English at the University of Southern California and has written seven scholarly books in literary studies, literary theory, and cultural studies. Kincaid has gradually lost his moorings in the academic world, so there is nothing left for him to do but adopt the guise of fiction writer. Writing about madness comes easy to him.

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Watershed by Percival Everett. Saint Paul. 1996. Graywolf Press. 1555972373. 204 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Adrian Morgan at Red Letter Design. Cover image courtesy of Photodisc.

1555972373 DESCRIPTION - On a windswept landscape somewhere north of Denver, Robert Hawks, a feisty and dangerously curious hydrologist, finds himself enmeshed in a fight over Native American treaty rights. What begins for Robert as a peaceful fishing interlude, ends in murder and the disclosure of government secrets. Why was the impossibly short Louise Yellow Calf hitching a ride on a snowy, deserted road following the discovery of two FBI agents murdered on the reservation? And what is the female FBI agent doing in Robert's shower? As our reluctant hero fits together the pieces in the all too rapidly unfolding drama, connections emerge to his own family's long-standing civil rights battles - battles that he has thus far managed to avoid. In WATERSHED, Percival Everett has created an original mystery that crackles with tension and sly wit. Robert Hawks is revealed as someone who has been indelibly defined by the history of our country's racial relationships, and the one man uniquely qualified to take us with him through this complex and contested territory.

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The One That Got Away by Percival Everett. Boston. 1992. Clarion/Houghton Mifflin. 0395564379. Illustrated by Dirk Zimmer. 32 pages. hardcover.

0395564379 DESCRIPTION - In this zany book with a Wild West setting, three cowpokes chase and corral "ones." "This offbeat but endearing little book exhibits a congenial marriage between text and illustration, at once whimsical and humorous." -- School Library Journal.

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Erasure by Percival Everett. Hanover. 2001. University Press of New England. 1584650907. 265 pages. hardcover. Cover photo by Elliott Erwitt.

1584650907 DESCRIPTION - Avant-garde novelist, college professor, woodworker, and fly fisherman - Thelonious (Monk) Ellison has never allowed race to define his identity. But as both a writer and an African American, he is offended and angered by the success of WE'S LIVES IN DA GHETTO, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days. Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection. Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. Forced to assume responsibility for a mother rapidly succumbing to Alzheimer's, Monk leaves his home in Los Angeles to return to the Washington D. C. house in which he grew up. There he must come to terms with his ailing mother, his siblings, his own childhood and youth, and the legacy of his physician father, a suicide some seven years before. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by WE'S LIVES IN DA GHETTO. But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk - or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh - is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems. Percival Everett's most recent novel, the academic satire GLYPH, was hailed b the New York Times as ‘both a treatise and a romp. This new novel combines a touching story of a man coming to terms with his family heritage and a satiric indictment of race and publishing in America.

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I Wake Up Screaming by Steve Fisher. Berkeley. 1988. Black Lizard Books. 0887390854. Originally Published In 1960. paperback.

0887390854 DESCRIPTION - The classic novel of sexual obsession and murder amid the star-making machinery of Hollywood in the 1950s. ‘She was as white as marble, but she looked lovely. Her hair was splayed out in fine strands of gold, and her lips were bright, rich red, and there was a green eyeshadow on her eyelids. You could see that because her eyes were closed and she was lying very still. She was lying still and she wasn't breathing.' With its portraits of washed-up directors, jaded leading men, and a ruthless cop whose one-track mind leads straight to a cyanide pellet, I WAKE UP SCREAMING is a magnificent thriller by a Hollywood insider whose screenplays included Lady in the Lake and I, Mobster. .

Fisher Steve AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stephen Gould Fisher (August 29, 1912 - March 27, 1980) was an American author best known for his pulp stories, novels and screenplays. He is one of the few pulp authors to go on to enjoy success as both an author in “slick” magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post, and as an in-demand writer in Hollywood. Steve Fisher was born 29 August 1912, in Marine City, Michigan. He was raised in Los Angeles, California, where he attended Oneonta Military Academy until running away to join the Navy at the age of sixteen. Fisher spent four years in the Navy submarine service, during which time he wrote prolifically, selling stories to U.S. Navy and Our Navy. After Fisher's discharge from the Navy, he settled in Greenwich Village, New York, where he decided to pursue writing as a career. The first few months proved difficult. Fisher could not sell a story and suffered eviction from two apartments, and once had his electricity shut off. In March 1934, however, he would publish his first story, “Hell's Scoop,” in Sure-Fire Detective Magazine, beginning a career of considerable literary success. Fisher's "Mistress Death" was the cover story on the May–June 1936 issue of New Mystery Adventures. Fisher published extensively in pulps throughout the 1930s, ‘40s and into the ‘50s. Magazines that featured his stories include Spicy Mystery Stories, Thrilling Detective, True Gang Life, Detective Fiction Weekly, The Shadow, New Mystery Adventures, Underground Detective, The Mysterious Fu Wang, The Phantom Detective, Ace Detective, Saucy Romantic Adventures, Mystery Adventure, Detective Tales, The Whisperer, Headquarters Detective, Hardboiled, Doc Savage, Feds, Federal Agent, Popular Detective, Clues, Detective Romances, Crime Busters, Pocket Detective and Detective Story Magazine. Some of Fisher's most significant stories, however, would be published in Black Mask, the seminal detective magazine. Famous Mask editor Joe Shaw rejected early submissions by Fisher, but under the editorship of Fanny Ellsworth, Fisher would help create a more emotional, psychological crime story, different from his hard-boiled Mask predecessors. Fisher stated, “[My] subjective style, mood and approach to a story was the antithesis of [a] Roger Torrey who, like Hammett, wrote objectively, with crisp, cold precision”. “The more emotionally charged style caught on and was featured in a number of detective pulps,” helping to establish a place for similar authors, such as Fisher's friend Cornell Woolrich. In total Fisher would publish nine stories in Black Mask: “Death of a Dummy,” “Flight to Paris,” “Hollywood Party,” “Jake and Jill,” “Latitude Unknown,” “Murder at Eight,” “No Gentleman Strangles His Wife,” “Wait for Me,” “You'll Always Remember Me,”. Fisher would also break into slick magazines during this period, a rare feat for a pulp writer. His stories saw simultaneous publication in pulps and in slicks such as Liberty, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan and American Magazine to name a few. He would also publish under the pennames Stephen Gould and Grant Lane, and would go on to publish hundreds of stories in pulp and slick magazines including Lt. Commander Sheridan Doome detective novels. Struggling financially, Fisher moved to Paris in 1939 to work and live more affordably. After only six month, his agent, H. N. Swanson, sold the stories “If You Break My Heart” and “Shore Leave” to Hollywood for film adaptation. Fisher returned to Hollywood where he would work for much of the remainder of his life as a screenwriter. Fisher wrote the screenplays for such notable films noir as Dead Reckoning and Lady in the Lake. He would also spent time writing novels, most notably I Wake Up Screaming, which was made into a film by the same name starring Victor Mature. During the 1970s, Fisher experienced great success writing for television, including such shows as Starsky & Hutch, McMillan & Wife and Barnaby Jones. He died of a heart attack on March 27, 1980 at his home in Canoga Park, Los Angeles, age 67.

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